The Lacking Permanence

Crafty pop punk, brimming over with chunky guitars, layered female vocals, and lots of sneering.

At one time, electronic soul felt like the future of music, but here is Hot Chip doing just the same thing in 2019 and it feels nostalgic.

The luthier adjusted the direction control of the four-legged arachnoform lumbering above the forest of Oro Bay. The spherical contraption had been difficult at first, but proved to be intuitive in guiding the transport’s spindly hissing legs across the varied terrain. Behind the padded seat, the cartographer consulted screens and printouts. The purple spruce should be visible soon. A single trunk would yield over a hundred cello bows, worth millions in the underground market. They were there to make sure it remained just another tree.

Insistent angular weirdfunk, songs that sound like tape loops that have fallen out of order and yet maintain a diligent desire to be songs.

Nice indie guitar sounds, with whispery vocals and a meandering melodic spirit.

A set of guitar-centered mid-tempo numbers that live somewhere in the region staked out by jazz, funk, and soul.

The catamarine knifed silently upstream, its passage discernible only as a faint twin wake on the surface of the river. Up ahead, the sonar array was already picking up the turbulence from the Mbocaruzú falls, the staccato warning pings slicing neatly between the Mozambique big-band swing being piped into the earpieces. In their individual pods, the cartographer and the miner reviewed their maps, surveys, and orders. Up ahead, behind the rushing down-flow of the water and completely out of sight, a set of steel doors silently opened and awaited the pair’s arrival.

Songs that the Purple One wrote for others, as performed by the person who wrote them. A good set of well-produced demos, but nothing that should have been released a long time ago and mostly of historical interest.

Hot-as-fire punk disco party with a raging saxophone and urgent female vocals.

Once above the canopy, it was impossible to see the green-winged hang-gliders that the archeologist and the mercenary had used to enter the Antananarivo bird sanctuary. Going through Customs had been dicey, the parts for the flying machines had been dispersed with various kinds of unassembled patio furniture, but the quality of the materials still stood out. Fortunately, the mercenary had brought up the Madagascar goth metal scene and distracted the functionaries into stamping passports and waving them through. They hadn’t even asked about the Geiger counter.